cyber monday SALE-20% off

20% off all items in the brandeye etsy shop.
this includes pet portraits...
AND
quilts...

and vintage...


just type brandeye20 into the comment box when you checkout and i will refund you the 20% through paypal.

quilt is finished and in the shop

i finished up my newest quilt this weekend and it's now in the brandeye etsy shop.


it would make a perfect christmas gift!

pappa al pomodoro or delicious tomato soup

i have this recipe book that i LOVE that friends of mine got us one year for christmas. it's called seriously simple by Diane Rossen Worthington. and look, i just did a google search and she has lots of recipe books HERE.
believe it or not, I actually made dinner the other night. well, not completely by myself, dave chopped the onions and garlic, but i did the rest! shocking, i know.

so this is the recipe, adapted from the recipe by Diane Rossen Worthington, from seriously simple.

i'll just call it:

seriously delicious tomato soup (with the optional sausage addition)

ingredients:
-1 28 ounce can san marzano tomatoes (splurge on these, they are worth it)
-a few tablespoons extra virgin olive oil (eyeball it, this isn't rocket science)
-a small onion chopped
-4 garlic cloves minced
-1/2 cup fresh basil chopped, plus garnish if you want to be fancy
-1/4 cup fresh sage chopped, plus garnish if you want to be fancy
-4 cups vegetable or chicken broth
-a loaf of delicious bread, italian, or a baguette, cubed (whatever you have around, stale bread works too)
-salt and pepper to taste
-parmesan cheese
-sausage (optional, we used turkey sausage)

directions:
1) in a medium soup pot, saute the garlic and onion in olive oil for a few minutes
2) add the fresh herbs and continue to saute for a few more minutes
3) add the tomatoes and broth (crush the tomatoes up in your hand before hand, in a large bowl, this part is fun and messy.)
4) bring to a boil, then reduce heat and simmer for 10 min.
5) if you want sausage involved in this recipe (it really is just as good without it), fry up some sausage in a separate pan, then add it to the simmering soup.
6) season with salt and pepper
7) ladle the soup into bowls, and add the cubed bread. toasting it first is nice too. garnish with herb leaves and parmesan cheese.


it is SO GOOD!!!

in-process quilt

i've been working away to finish this new quilt. all that's left is hand sewing the binding!

quilt sandwich.

screw hand quilting, machine quilting all the way!

and the scraps made a perfect little banner for myself :-) it just so happened to perfectly match a little painting of mine.

depending on how long the binding takes, it should be in the shop this weekend!

on it's way

i just love waking up on saturday mornings to a sale! yeah, the quilt is on it's way. it was my first quilt sale and i really need to finish the two i am working on!

lovely weekend

we had an excellent weekend and lots of free time to do whatever we wanted. we were pet-sitting kioshi, my parents dog and this pretty much sums up the weekend. just add some raking and delicious food and bowling party-time

apple fest

a few weekends ago we went to the apple fest, we go every year. the weather on the way looked like it might storm all day, but ended being perfect.
there were lots of apples involved.

grandpaw

my grandpaw, as he would always spell it in cards, was truly the best grandpa that i could have asked for. he was a true sweetheart, and a piss cutter. a term which dave and i now use as much as possible. you see my grandpa wrote on the back of almost every photograph he had, and referred to himself on a couple of occasions as "wasn't i a piss cutter" or "look at that piss cutter." apparently (thanks to the urban dictionary) it means smart young man, or can also mean something is really shitty or below average. and he certainly wasn't shitty, so i am sure he meant smart young man.

you will be missed grandpaw and i will never forget what you told me every time you saw me, "grandpa loves you." this world was so very lucky to have you for 90 years.

my favorite bowl

i have one just like it for myself and i've seen it in lots of house tours while browising the intraweb. and you should have one too. it's a vintage Anchor Hocking bowl, the pattern was introduced in the 1930s and manufactured until 1965.

milk glass bubble bowl